In confessing that the war made me write a book I do not stand alone. Sensible as I am of its defects, I trust it will help to spread the knowledge of Massinger’s works, and will invite others to deal on similar lines with the other dramatists of the great age. The design widened as it went on, and was then contracted. In the end I thought it wiser to confine myself to digesting the knowledge which I had of Massinger’s text. The Clarendon Press undertook to publish this book, but as, owing to war-work, they could fix no date, I asked them to release me. There would be no occasion to mention this fact were it not that it was owing to the original arrangement that I received much valuable help and advice from Mr. Percy Simpson. Many other scholars and friends have kindly aided me in various matters, among whom I should like to mention: Mr. J. C. Bailey, Mr. P. James Bayfield (photographer to Dulwich College), Dr. A. C. Bradley, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. A. H. Bullen, Mr. A. K. Cook, Professor W. Macneile Dixon, Mr. H. H. E. Gaster, the Dean of Gloucester, Mr. E. Gosse, Sir W. H. Hadow, Archdeacon Hobhouse, Sir Sidney Lee, Mr. C. Leudesdorf, Dr. Falconer Madan, Mr. A. W. Pollard, Dr. P. G. Smyly, the Master of University College, Durham, Sir A. Ward, and Sir George F. Warner. Last, but not least, I thank my wife for her skilful and ready help with the proofs. A. H. Cruickshank. PHILIP MASSINGER It is interesting to revise the literary judgments of youth; it is pleasant to find them confirmed by a more mature judgment. This train of thought has led me to read Massinger once more; and as I read, the desire arose to treat his works, to the best of my ability, with the attention to detail which modern scholarship requires. A great amount of valuable work has been done in the last fifty years on the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages; but no one, perhaps with the exception of Boyle, has applied to Massinger the care which Shakspere, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, to name no others, have secured. There is no reason why any of our great dramatists should be treated with less respect than those of Greece and Rome, of France and Germany. The first thing to be done was to facilitate references by numbering the lines of Massinger’s plays;(1) the next was to investigate once more the facts of his life, and to correlate them with the period in which he lived; the third was to read typical plays of the period, so as to arrive at a just estimate of our author. His life will not detain us long. We know far less of him than we do of Shakspere. None of his sayings have been preserved to us; hardly any incidents of his career. His father was house-steward to two of the Earls of Pembroke, first to Henry Herbert, then to William Herbert,(2) Shakspere’s friend. The elder Massinger was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and for several years a Member of Parliament. Philip Massinger, the dramatist, was born at Salisbury in 1584. In 1602 he went up to St. Alban’s Hall, Oxford, where his father had been an undergraduate. We are told by A. à Wood that he went at Lord Pembroke’s expense, but that he did not work hard at the University, and took no degree.(3) In or after the year 1606 he seems to have gone to London, and to have speedily...